Yesterday I was checking emails and working in the office, like I do most mornings, when I thought, “I better hurry or I’ll be late for my appointment with Rose Gehman.”
I pick her up each Monday morning at 8:35 and take her to the TFC International Office, Marietta, PA, where I am training her to order and ship ministry materials (Bibles, books, Bible on cassette and CD, shirts, mud flaps, lighted crosses, and a variety of other things truckers can use to grow in the Lord or to share the gospel). Most items are shipped to our truck stop chapels around the country. I have been doing that out of our Manheim Office since 1990, and the Morgantown, PA, office a half dozen years before that. We moved those items to Marietta last fall when construction was completed on the International Office. Rose was my answer to prayer for someone to take over this position.
Rose
I left the house about ten minutes late, knowing it didn’t really matter, but Rose was probably wondering where I was. Shortly after I got there, her husband Gene came out and knocked on my window. I rolled the window down, and he said, “Aren’t you a bit early?”
“I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, I am a few minutes late,” I replied.
“Doesn’t the office only open at 9:00,” he asked?
The “lights” finally went on. It was 7:45. I was an hour early!
Oh well, I had fun talking to Gene while Rose got ready.
That is another story!
Last week I had a phone call from Rebecca St. James’ production manager. He was looking for a Christian truck driver to haul sound equipment for ten weeks -starting the end of January. She travels with three buses and one tractor trailer, and has concerts across the United States.
Rose and I were traveling home from the office that afternoon, when Gene called in on the cell phone. Rose had the speaker on, so I heard him tell her where he was being dispatched that week. I jokingly said to her, “Tell Gene that I can dispatch him to drive for Rebecca St. James.”
He must have been ready for a challenge, having a midlife crisis, or something, because he said, “Can you get me that number? I’m really interested.
So here we are one week later, and he is making plans for a ten-week excursion traveling across the country, hauling Rebecca St. James’ sound equipment!
Gene & Grandson Jackson
What fun to have an extra hour at their house and hear how God is working things out, and what their plans are for those ten weeks. (He is going only if he can drive his own tractor, and he thought that was probably working out.) He was waiting for a reply. If he goes, Rose will join him some of the time.